In something dubbed "investigative" reporting, NBC would have us know that San Francisco's Tenderloin district is a pigpen, filled to the brim with junkie needles and human excrement.

The NBC Bay Area Investigative Unit surveyed 153 blocks of downtown San Francisco in search of trash, needles, and feces.  The investigation revealed trash littered across every block.  The survey also found 41 blocks dotted with needles and 96 blocks sullied with piles of feces.

File under non-news, unless you like minutia.  You wonder how much time they invested on the story for being able to tell us that.  As if it were something new.

Anyone who has lived for any time in San Francisco knows that's the place you stay out of.  I lived there, on and off, for 14 years, having been a student there in the 1980s and 1990s and forced to take the city's public transportation, which goes right through that area, and this has always been the state of things.  Do we see the problem spreading geographically, based on the NBC charts?  Not really.  The grossness is up, but it's pretty well confined to the same old places.  Such hype.

The real story is that nothing has changed, tech boom or no tech boom.  The area is still the same old "gross," even as city coffers fill and bureaucrats grow more numerous with the vast expanding left-wing government.  NBC says the city spends $30 million to clean it all up, and, well, the first thought that comes to mind is how much of that goes to bureaucratic salaries and bennies, not the actual cleaning up of the streets so filthy they amount to a health hazard.  Because though the people interviewed say they're doing cleanup, it's not exactly making a difference, and they seem to know it, too.

What might be going on is the tail-end of the tech boom, and with property values soaring, and conditions remaining exactly the same in the most disgusting part of America's most expensive city, some developer wants to hose that dump out, the better to get his money's worth on the soaring property values.  Hence the story, banging on the drum of grossness and telling us the zone is disgusting.

Why is the Tenderloin such a revolting place?  Why, after all the money that has flowed in from multiple booms, and all the decades that have gone past, is that place the same old cesspit it's always been?  Hint: It's loaded with social services agencies and a police force that goes out of its way to bow to activist groups who favor its special interest groups – hookers, the homeless, and illegal aliens (such as José Inés García Zarate, who was a regular in those parts before venturing eastward toward the Embarcadero-area piers to kill Kate Steinle).  As Thomas Sowell has said, you can have all the poverty you'd like to pay for.

And the NBC report shows it, quoting up and coming politicians offering "solutions" such as more beds for the homeless instead of self-sufficiency programs and incentives to make them...not homeless.  As if those things have never been proposed before.  San Francisco's last Republican mayor was elected in 1964.  The combination of leftist policies and one-party city corruption is ultimately what's behind same-old, same-old, doing the same insane acts over and over and expecting a different result.

That's left NBC reporting that the sky is blue, with some fancy-schmancy map technology to identify the grossest streets.  How much better it would be if NBC would find out instead why this is happening and engage in actual reporting.